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Was WhatsApp ever secure or open? Wasn't it just a proprietary wrapper for xmpp?

There are other jabber/xmpp/jingle clients out there. I'm not sure what is the best client but pidgin works well for most things IIRC. Miranda IM may also be worth a look, or Adium. All three are a GPL or similar license I think.

Well, there aren't really any apps that satisfy all of that. Open-source, secure, video and mobile. Thought the post I was replying to did not specify mobile (although that's WhatsApp's main platform I guess). But the Point I was trying to make is that WhatsApp didn't satisfy those requirements either. It wasn't open, nor secure.

Anyways. there is Xabber for Android -- but I don't think that has video. Also many Android users use Google Hangouts / Talk etc for chat and video, but that is not open-sourc

I use WhatsApp and have unlimited free SMS. WhatsApping is useless for me in a 1v1 conversation, but group chats are where the attraction lies. Also my sister isn't officially allowed to send private messages from her work phone, but WhatsApp circumvents that.

They're after the user base, and were afraid WhatsApp was becoming to big a competitor. They're no competitor anymore.

And besides, WhatsApp is more than SMS has on offer - can send photos etc, group chat, whatever. Pretty much everything Facebook is useful for (the News Feed used to be the strong point of Facebook, until they fucked that one up: I get messages posted "one hour ago" a few screen pages deep in my feed, in between day-before-yesterday's messages; plus messages of pages that I like are simply n

And this promise that nothing's going to change? Laughable. If nothing else it will receive facebook branding (subtle, such as color changes) pretty quickly, and the only reason to build it out further is so that they can reap even further benefits (read: more users) over to facebook at a later point.

And this promise that nothing's going to change? Laughable. If nothing else it will receive facebook branding (subtle, such as color changes) pretty quickly, and the only reason to build it out further is so that they can reap even further benefits (read: more users) over to facebook at a later point.

"Independent"? Nothing will change? LOL. They are in for a big surprise if they actually believe Facebook's line of bullshit. And here's a short piece of one of their blog entries:

When people ask us why we charge for WhatsApp, we say “Have you considered the alternative?”

At WhatsApp, our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new features and ironing out all the little intricacies in our task of bringing rich, affordable, reliable messaging to every phone in the world. That’s our product and that’s our passion. Your data isn’t even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it.

Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.

Now that Facebook has spent $4 Billion Dollars (the $12 Billion in funny money is irrelevant) these guys are in for a rude awakening.

1. Launch a service that does something people really want without any of the annoyances of other similar services (ads, privacy intrusions,...) and without trying to make much money. Maybe even lose money, who cares.2. Get lots of users who appreciate the fact that somebody is finally catering to their needs without constantly trying to milk them for information or bombard them with ads.3. Sell to some big company like FaceBook for billions of dollars, which then proceeds to add the usual annoyances like ads and privacy intrusions after having promised not to do so.4. Goto 1.

I don't think Facebook care if they move users over from WhatsApp or not. They don't care as much about the users as they do about their data. As long as the data can be cross referenced at the back end, then who cares if the end user's front end is totally different?

This is the way that Facebook needs to evolve. They've realised that teenagers (tomorrow's consumers) don't want to hang out on the social network that their parents use. So you establish/buy/build another social application that has the a

not sure how you can not have heard of it. It runs on almost every mobile platform available and is the most common messaging app around. I don't use social media at all and barely message anyone and even I have had it installed on my phone for over a year.

It's world-wide. We use it to "text" family in Central Asia. We get one of the younger ones to get the older ones onto Skype for a video call but often just for regular quick short messages, pictures, videos, etc. The older generation doesn't seem to have it on their phones, which tend toward the simpler, usually.

The user base is significant (and the private information that comes with it) but I agree that there's a tech bubble many times bigger than the 98's. I wonder how much will the big investors get out of it before it bursts.

Remember where the scores on pinball machines were sane then one day I saw the ST TNG pinball and the score was like in the millions. Was like WTF? The pricing on some of these virtual companies is the same.

3500 cents per user. At a fraction of a cent per user per dataset sold, that's going to be a lot of marketing demographic / dat mining pulls to even think about breaking even. It's one thing to sell click-though or impression adds for fractional cents (on average, sure you might get 10c on some, but not everyone is a homosexual male 22-35 with a 6+ figure income), but there's currently no ad stream for this set.

As for monetizing the product, we've moved out of desktop and winmobile apps that could reasonab

Thanks to biometric face reading techniques this is true. Any photo of you that is on there has enough biometric data for them to uniquely identify you and who you hang out with. And people can even tag your name to the photo if you don't have an account, so they get a name to match with the biometric data. Then they can know who your friends are and family. are, the places where you go and probably some other stuff. All this because someone took some photos of you and posted them.

Personally, I think it would be too easy for a company that has the data on hand, and no concept of "boundaries" or "no, that's creepy" to resist. They already have millions of users complete address books from the find a friend feature, faces of people they know IRL tagged in photos, locations from check-ins, etc. it's just a matter of writing the right queries to tie them all togeth

$16B!! Are they nucking futs?
It feels to me – as someone who worked through InetBubbleBurst 1.0 - like FB is flailing at something, anything, using the huge cash cache it’s currently sitting on in a feeble and misdirected attempt at non-relevance.
Just proof that huge dollars huge brains.

nah, seems more like they are throwing cash at every company that mimics in a superior manner any piece of fb people used to use. Chat and images are the big two,the problem is, any new company can come along and start the same service, at which point fb will have to buy them as well. this was the story with instagram, they then tried to buy snapchat, and now bought whatsapp.

I currently live in Asia. Whatsapp is very, very popular over here.
A good number of my European contacts are also using it.
I don't know how popular it is in the USA.
I find it a very useful piece of software, one of the most used apps on my iphone.

It is not like IM was invented yesterday you know? Some of us have better things to do than figure out what's the irrelevant app of the day.

I've never heard of it either and I'm not that old, maybe it's only popular in certain regions? One of those third world fads?

I get the impression that it is popular in *cough* certain countries *cough* where the telcos freely rape their customers over text messages and mobile data.

Where I live (Sweden), I get unlimited texting and nearly unlimited (5GB/mo) data for about 50 bucks a month. Since this is a very typical plan from a very typical Scandinavian carrier (Telenor), I am not surprised that I've neither seen nor heard of this app before.

You spend 50$ a month? And you say that other countries' telcos are raping their customers? Here in Italy I pay 6 EUR a month and I have 120 minutes of calling, 120 SMS, and 2GB data. Not unlimited, but quite enough (for me). And even before I had a flat plan I did not pay all that much!

You've never heard of it? Are you still using your carrier's txt plan? Lolz

Why wouldn't I? I can text anyone anywhere in the world for free, and I don't have to worry about whether we're using the same service and if they actually still check that service or blah blah blah. And services like WhatsApp are tied to phone numbers anyways, so WhatsApp users are just a subset of people with numbers I could text to.

In a reasonable world everyone's incoming texts would be free, but we do not live in such a world.

I have never paid for incoming texts (in the UK) - I think the rest of the world outside the USA is reasonable as I've only heard of that practice happening in the USA. I used to be pay as you go for years although in January I started a one-month repeating package of unlimited texts and unlimited internet for £12 (which Google tells me is about $20).

Whatsapp has absolutely zero personal information about me at this point in time apart from my phone number (which I change about once a year). I really like how simple and useful whatsapp is however there aint no fucking way I will believe FB spent that much money on an app that loses money and doesn't intend to change anything. but just like the bloat and shit that allowed whatsapp to become successful something else will take its place as FB tries in vain to turn it into a money making business and destr

Actually the only thing it has is phone numbers. never registered a facebook/google/Skype account with it and never would. the details of the phone numbers are near useless due to how often myself and my friends replace them and none of us use real names in messaging, paranoia thing from way back and seemingly justified given FB buying them out.

I read the web site, and I still don't understand what this web site is all about. Is it really just yet another messaging platform designed to get around SMS messaging charges? Am I missing something obvious?

1. There are tons and tons of ways to send messages to people last I checked. Why is this one worth "$16B"?

2. Who still pays for SMS messages? I've had unlimited texting plans for the better part of a decade, and they're cheaper than most people's cable TV bills. Are text messages significantly expensive outside of the US?

Well, people in Europe still suffer from text messages costing money if sent across borders. Anachronistic with a culture that thrives more and more on international communication, but that needs some sort of fix.

Domestic SMS is cheap. But internationally (and in Europe, "international" is something you can get quite easily, there's hardly a country with spots within its borders that has more than 1000 miles to a different country) you'd assume they're using carrier pigeons to deliver, considering the price, speed and reliability.

It can do cross-mobile-platform IM, group chats, file sharing (video and audio mostly) and as of recent push to talk communication. Also, the phone number is your user account - everyone of your phone contacts will show up in your WA contact list if they use it. Many agree it is the tidies and simplest messenger for mobile platforms around.

On the downside there is their shitty data protection and blatant security faults in the past. On Android, you can't switch off presence and reading confirmations which is quite unfortunate if your boss or knows your phone number - they will always be able to check when you were last on.

As much as I'd love to dispose WhatsApp, I have given up any attempt to do so. Once you registered, you can't unregister (or rather, the function does nothing) and people will continue to send you things. I resigned and tell everyone to not send any sensible information over this service and I use a modded Android app (WhatsApp+... you can find the project page on Google+) which allows me to hide my online status.

Yes you can uninstall. But I wrote unregister - thus unsubscribe from the service and disappear from everyone's contact list. Last times I unregistered, I still was available as a contact. For others it appeared as if I just never read the message when in fact it was lost. Even after registering again, the messages sent during my absence were not delivered.

As said, they want to keep it simple. They won't provide a desktop client and you can't use one account on multiple devices either. No hopes that will ev

I use WhatsApp. Two reasons. One, the message seamlessly integrates with insert photos, audio, and video. Traditional SMS does not support those media well. Two, it is very popular out of the US. I have a lot of personal contacts from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Europe. It is nice to have everyone on the same platform. I have no idea about how much international SMS costs.
Recently (last two years), I have noticed that most of the messaging activities between my contacts and I have be gradually shifting from Wh

(I also replied the following elsewhere in this discussion, but it is apt here as well)

I currently live in Asia. Whatsapp is very, very popular over here.
A good number of my European contacts are also using it.
I don't know how popular it is in the USA.
I find it a very useful piece of software, one of the most used apps on my iphone.

I read the web site, and I still don't understand what this web site is all about. Is it really just yet another messaging platform designed to get around SMS messaging charges? Am I missing something obvious?

1. There are tons and tons of ways to send messages to people last I checked. Why is this one worth "$16B"?

They pay for the userbase.

2. Who still pays for SMS messages? I've had unlimited texting plans for the better part of a decade, and they're cheaper than most people's cable TV bills. Are text messages significantly expensive outside of the US?

Yes, outside the US prices vary a lot. I pay, what you'd percieve as 20-50cents per message. I know other countries do have free SMS. Some plans here have free SMS, but they're the extremely expesive ones.

Honestly, there should be a viable, easy-to-use alternative to Facebook which respects your privacy and doesn't have shady dealings with a government and isn't run by a functionally retarded man-child. But if there is one, well I don't know about it. And if I don't know about it, then 95% of people don't know about it.

Same with WhatsApp. It's very useful, but this isn't advanced AI here: it's pretty clear what it does and how it does it. Where is the good, user-friendly, open-source alternative?

Honestly, there should be a viable, easy-to-use alternative to Facebook which respects your privacy and doesn't have shady dealings with a government and isn't run by a functionally retarded man-child. But if there is one, well I don't know about it. And if I don't know about it, then 95% of people don't know about it.

I concurs, but sadly, most people don't, and that's why we don't have such an alternative.:(

In this thread: http://meta.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org] it is pretty obvious, that not only the "fuck beta" people are pissed. In that thread there were many great comments and suggestions to Dice, what is bad with beta and how should they improve it. After zero effort to improve anything, some of the very skilled people stopped to complain and started to do something about it and other people joined them on Soylentnews.
Nowadays, I can assure you, that there is almost no topic on Slashdot that doesn't have some

The fact that there are no "Fuck Beta" articles at Soylent is irrelevant. There are none on the "Daring Fireball" blog either, for obvious reasons - that's not where you'd expect to find them.

Furthermore, while Soylent doesn't yet have a huge number of comments it's clear there is a committed community of interested readers that like the site. So it's got lots of hope and lots of promise. I think it's early to boast "Soylent has better comments" but there's certainly proof the gang is heading in that dir

When the beta was re-revealed in January they hadn't even touched the biggest issue, that the comment system was fundamentally broken (not "it's got bugs" broken, but "the design is completely wrong" broken).

Consequently there was lots of gnashing of teeth that they _still_ didn't understand that this was the core feature, and everyone that had been paying attention gave up on any hope that they would address it.

While I agree the agitation has blown the issue out of proportion, software lifecycle?

Do you know what beta means? Full features, probably significant bugs, useful but not necessarily stable. The slashdot beta does not satisfy those criteria. The lack of features make it an early alpha.